Automation & The End of the Human Race.

Automation & The End of the Human Race.

I have just had a chat with my fellow workmates, some of them are a little annoyed that I have set Solarwinds SAM up to detect and restart IIS application pools. The engineers get paid overtime rates for working at night and with the application pools now being restarted automatically, Solarwinds has saved the company money.

I have set Solarwinds to restart MySQL and several other key applications in the event of a service down trigger action.

Management loves me, the engineers are not so happy. Part of my job is trying to persuade the engineers what I am doing for them is in their best interests.

I move from company to company helping infrastructure teams in the UK through their Solarwinds requirements and it is interesting how differently the companies and the workforce view automation.

There will come a point where automation will take over, we will no longer be required.

Every requirement predicted, thresholds set and resulting actions applied.

We are the creator, the igniting spark of genius in the creation of artificial intelligence, but once the trigger is perfected, the threshold reached and the resulting action of re-creation is perfected our usefulness will lessen.

An Artificial Intelligence could be kind and look after us like a son does for an elderly father, or it could be economically unsustainable to keep us around, our cellular structures simply too costly to maintain.

I will embrace automation, as I know my environment is in safe hands and it saves me having to get up at night.

If at some point I become one with a machine then so be it. I will embrace that too. Many of us are already cyborgs these days anyway. My father has a wirelessly controlled pacemaker along with many other technological implants for hearing and bone reconstruction.

Our automated sons and daughters will look back at us with fondness like we look back at Bonobo’s running around a Zoo.